2007, Piran, Slovenia

Clothing
SPACER FABRICS IN OUTDOOR CLOTHING -
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH THE HOHENSTEIN SKIN
MODEL
Boris Bauer and Volkmar T. Bartels
Hohenstein Institutes, Hohenstein Castle, 74357 Boennigheim, Germany
Contact person: boris.bauer@hohenstein.de
INTRODUCTION
Outdoor clothing is used in many different applications, including sport, leisure and
work activities. Consequently, both the level of physical activity and the climatic
conditions may vary over wide ranges. For this reason, outdoor clothing has to offer
high wearer comfort in many different situations, which may involve insensible and
sensible perspiration.
If the outdoors, clothing is often equipped with a separate insulation layer. Typically,
insulation materials from fleece or non-woven textiles are used, but recent
investigations have now shown that wearer comfort of outdoor clothing can be
considerably improved by using spacer fabrics [1]. However, the term of spacer fabric
comprises an outmost heterogeneous textile group, because the spacer fabric’s integral
constituents (“skin facing fabric surface”, “spacer layer”, “outer fabric surface”) can
be configured by the engineers in many forms, and these can be largely independent
of each other, resulting in an almost infinite variety of construction options. This
paper describes a method to identify the optimal constructional parameters by means
of measurements performed using the Hohenstein Skin Model [2].
METHODS
The Hohenstein Skin Model simulates the sweating human skin. The highly porous
measuring unit is heated by means of electric heating-management and is
simultaneously supplied with distilled water by means of a special irrigation system.
The amount of water transferred to the measuring unit is variable, and for this reason
the Hohenstein Skin Model is applicable to simulate various wearer situations, with
insensible as well as with sensible perspiration.
For the investigations, twelve different spacer fabrics were manufactured. Defined
parameters of these spacer fabrics that affect either the textile construction (structure
of the skin facing fabric surface ribbed or fully fashioned, spacer thread density high
or low) or the weft construction (without wefts or wefts from polypropylene (PP),
Table 1: Scheme of the derived sample groups.
sample group textile construction
weft construction
skin facing fabric surface spacer thread density
1 ribbed high density -, CO, PP, CV
2 ribbed low density -, CO, PP, CV
3 fully fashioned low density -, CO, PP, CV
4 ribbed/high density, ribbed/low density, fully fashiond/low density
-
5 ribbed/high density, ribbed/low density, fully fashiond/low density
CO
6 ribbed/high density, ribbed/low density, fully fashiond/low density
PP
7 ribbed/high density, ribbed/low density, fully fashiond/low density
CV
cotton (CO), viscose (VS), respectively) were varied. For the analysis procedure, the
twelve spacer fabrics were combined according to the following scheme into 7 sample
groups (Table 1).
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